The strategy suggested by Jiminion might work fairly well in practice, but it does risk revealing some extra information about the ladies' ages if the distribution of the random number(s) is known (or can be guessed).
For example, let's say Ana picks her random number uniformly between 0 and 100; that's surely random enough to totally obscure her age, right? But if the sum of her age and the random number turns out to be, say, 15 or 185, then Barbara has some pretty strong upper / lower bounds on Ana's age.
The way to eliminate this information leak is to use modular arithmetic, e.g. like this:
Ana picks a random number between 0 and 999 (inclusive)1, adds her age to it, and hands the last three digits2 of the result to Barbara.
Barbara adds her age to this number (it is not necessary for her to add a second random number), and hands the last three digits of the result to Carol.
Carol and Diana do as Barbara did, with Diana handing the last three digits of the resulting sum back to Ana.
Ana adds 1000 to the sum, subtracts her original random number, takes the last three digits and divides them by 4. The result is the average age of the ladies.
Notes:
1) The modulus 1000 is chosen because it's presumably larger than the sum of the ladies' ages; any suitably large modulus M could be used, with the random number chosen from between 0 and M−1.
2) To avoid side channel attacks, the reduction modulo 1000 should be done in a way that does not reveal whether the original number was over 999 or not; in particular, simply subtracting 1000 from any four-digit result could leak information, since the other ladies might see you push some extra buttons on the calculator to do it. It's safer to just re-type the last three digits from memory. The same goes for the final subtraction and reduction by Ana, too.
It's easy enough to prove that Barbara cannot learn anything about Ana's age at step 2, since, regardless of Ana's actual age, the number Barbara gets from her is equally likely to be any number between 0 and 999.
By a similar argument, it's also clear that Carol and Diana cannot learn anything about the other ladies' ages at step 3. Finally, at step 4, the number Ana receives from Diana is simply the sum of all their ages (which the protocol is designed to reveal), plus her own random number, so it tells her nothing but the information she was supposed to get.
However, note that this protocol is not secure against collusion: Ana and Carol together can figure out Barbara's age by comparing the number Ana gave out to what Carol received. (They can also figure out Diana's age the same way — but if they do both, then they also end up revealing their own ages to each other!) Of course, Barbara and Diana can also collude to learn the age of Ana and/or Carol the same way.
It might seem that Barbara could protect herself from such collusion attacks by also adding a random number of her own to the sum, and then subtracting it during a second round (as in Jiminion's original protocol), but alas, this doesn't actually help: if Ana and Carol collude, they can compare their numbers again during this second pass, and so learn Barbara's random number, and thus her age.
BTW, this puzzle is a simple example of secure multiparty computation, which is an active subfield of cryptography. The specific protocol described here is also somewhat reminiscent of various secret sharing schemes, which might also make interesting further reading.